electrical storm. The longer I focused my attention on my body, the more I recognised a wound-up tension, particularly in my chest and belly. I shared this with the rest of the group and forewarned them that they may need an umbrella during the course of the day. No one did or said anything. No


one knew what was going on that had gathered these storm clouds together. But I felt more connected to and known by the team, which in itself led to a transformation of these feelings. The clouds started to break. Rays of brightness shone through. In the context of a particularly hectic and


interpersonally demanding job, I started to use this short mindfulness activity more frequently. I was juggling a split role, providing psychological liaison for two busy, complex and at times challenging paediatric medical teams. Each team had its own pattern of relational needs emerging from professional discourses, past events, and personal preferences. It was hard to balance the needs of these teams and at times hard to separate them out. By checking in with my internal weather between meetings and clinics with these two teams I found that I would arrive better prepared and more relationally attuned.


Theory or practice? A strange loop


As mentioned earlier, I fi nd myself more


closely aligned to a position of theory and understanding than of practice and direct experience. I started to become curious about how an intrapersonal approach such as mindfulness could help me to navigate a systemic, intrapersonal challenge. Unfortunately, for a time, my desire for


theoretical rigour drew me into a catch-22 style strange loop (Cronen et al., 1982). In the context of “theoretical rigour”, my mindfulness practice became dominated by attempts to understand, taking me further away from my direct experience. In this way, the internal weather report became less eff ective and I became more stressed. This invited a more utilitarian context of “doing what works”, allowing me to enter into the mindfulness practice more experientially. This reduced my stress levels and I became curious as to how this worked, inviting the context of “theoretical rigour”. And so on (see Figure 1).


24


Theory/practice position Engagement with


internal weather report My feelings


Theory: Doing what fits Conceptual Stressed


Figure 1: Theory/practice strange loop “Body talk” At the same time, I was reading


and thinking about the therapeutic opportunities aff orded by consideration of clients’ bodily experiences. As a clinical psychologist working in a physical health setting, that was probably inevitable. I had started reading Jo Bownas and Glenda Fredman’s edited book (2017) about embodiment in supervision, and also Fredman’s paper on preparing the self for the therapeutic relationship by refl ecting on your body’s emotional postures (Fredman, 2007). Drawing on the work of Griffi th and


Elliot Griffi th (1994), Fredman (2007) describes emotional postures as the body’s preparedness for responding – they are a whole-body state of emotional communication, in the physical actions available to us, the words we speak and the positions that these invite in relation to others. A distinction is drawn between emotional postures of tranquillity (those that invite connection, mutual respect and dialogue) and mobilisation (those that invite self-protection, blame and confl ict). According to Fredman, these postures shape our interactions with others, and bringing attention to them can transform our communication. I started to wonder whether this might be a helpful way of thinking about how I was navigating the network of relationships in my roles at work. Was I unwittingly, mindlessly carrying certain emotional postures between encounters that contributed to blurring of relationships and diffi culty separating out the roles? Was the internal weather report helping me to become more aware of my emotional postures and allowing me to choose those that felt most helpful?


Theory and practice


The final part of the jigsaw came in the form of a chance conversation with


a colleague about using John Burnham’s approach, method, technique framework (Burnham, 1992) as a way of structuring some teaching we were delivering. I had never really got to grips with this framework the first time round so, in the midst of my strangely loopy dalliances with mindfulness, I decided to revisit Burnham’s paper. In his model, Burnham offers a


framework that describes reflexive influences between different levels of clinical practice: the approach (loosely, the theories, values and assumptions underpinning one’s practice); the method (the form of practice that allows the approach to be implemented); and the technique (the specific therapeutic strategies used to achieve the method). Burnham writes that an approach can provide a context that invites particular methods and techniques, but that equally new techniques (or existing ones used in a novel way) can have implications for the approaches in which they are used. In fact, Burnham explicitly states that


he had encountered dilemmas of a similar form to my own strange loop (see “But is it systemic...?”, p. 15). He encourages the reader to deconstruct a practice and carry forward those aspects that are coherent with the preferred approach. This reflexive framework (along with


Fredman’s writing) has helped me to recontextualise mindfulness as a systemic practice and has also shaped my ideas about the importance of attending to embodied experience when discerning meanings within a relationship. This can perhaps be most neatly summarised in the following approach, method, technique scheme for this aspect of my practice: Approach: Systemic (attending to patterns of relationship); second-order cybernetic (working with my own involvement in the therapeutic system);


Context 170, August 2020


Practice: Doing what works Experiential Curious


Dr Strangeloop or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Mindfulness


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